Yorkshire MP says ‘emergency law’ is needed to send migrants back to ‘safe countries’

David Davis said “emergency legislation” could be passed within a few weeks to stop people from “abusing our system”.

The Tory MP for Haltemprice and Howden also said Albanians are clearly exploiting the system, as an estimated 12,000 have arrived in the UK via small boats this year.

“It's a perfectly safe country from the point of view of being an asylum seeker because you really can't claim asylum coming from there,” he told GB News.

“The Swedes basically take no asylum seekers from Albania because they say it's a safe country. Our law for some reason doesn't allow us to do that.

“The second thing they do is they claim to have been trafficked - that they are modern slaves. We had this modern slavery legislation go through, well-intentioned legislation, but they claim they are trafficked.

“If you've been trafficked, surely the thing you want to do is to go straight back home, isn't it? It's not to sit in Manston or in a hotel in my constituency for years, while we sort out what's happened to you.”

The former Brexit Minister added: “It seems to me that we need to pass through the House of Commons, a very short piece of legislation, which doesn't say we're going to take people’s asylum rights away because we've been giving those hundreds of years, but says if people come from a safe country, they go straight back to that safe country.

“Not back to France or to Germany or wherever they've been en route, but back to the original safe country.”

It comes as The Home Office is struggling to find accommodation for thousands of people who have arrived in the UK, after crossing the Channel on small boats, and clear a backlog of claims for asylum.

There were 63,089 claims in the year ending June 2022, the highest number for almost 20 years, and the Government is now spending almost £7m a day on hotel accommodation for asylum seekers who are awaiting a decision.

However, the Nationality and Borders Act, which was introduced earlier this year, states that most migrants who travel to the UK from a country deemed to be safe, such as France, are "inadmissible" for asylum status.

The legislation also prevents people from claiming asylum in the territorial waters of the UK.

Earlier this month, Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary Dominic Raab said the Government is set to revive the British Bill of Rights as part of his Government’s strategy to deal with the small boats crisis.

He said the legislation – giving the UK courts supremacy over the European Court of Human Rights – will return to Parliament “in the coming weeks”.

When it was introduced by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, ministers said it would prevent judges in the Strasbourg court from interfering in the Government’s controversial policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda to have their claims processed.

However, the Bill was shelved by Liz Truss when she became Prime Minister in September after Government sources warned it was “unlikely to progress in its current form”.